Use of a Patient Navigator to Increase Utilization of a Women’s Lifestyle Medicine Training Clinic

Abstract

In the United States, women face greater risks of death in pregnancy and childbirth than women in other wealthy countries. This is influenced by preventable conditions like hypertension, substance use disorders, and diabetes mellitus. The risk is greater for women from diverse, low-income communities. Lifestyle medicine (LM) can help prevent and reverse the effects of chronic diseases. LM Physicians can reduce the occurrence of preventable diseases by counseling patients to make choices to improve their health outcomes. Access to LM is often a challenge for low-resource populations. This article outlines an intervention in 1 low-resource county, San Bernardino, where a full-time Patient Navigator (PN) assisted at a Federally Qualified Health Care Centre (FQHC) to improve patient engagement with women’s health clinics through appointment scheduling, reminders, and rescheduling to virtual appointments as needed. Throughout an 18-month period, the women’s clinic saw a 4-fold increase in appointments with help from the PN, who followed up with no-shows, offered phone consultations, and was key in problem-solving barriers to care. The clinics were scaled and included the addition of residents who could participate in LM training supervised by a LM Physician, gaining insight into needs among low-resourced communities. This demonstrates a scalable model for increasing access to LM interventions for women in low-resourced communities, as well as allowing trainee clinical experiences in priority populations.